"I am about to reveal what Google doesn't want you to know... because most of Google doesn't know!"

But first...

When I talk to various people in the internet advertising industry, I have yet to meet anyone of any sophistication many large spenders who love Google. They may like them, respect them, and need them, but they feel lukewarm at most towards the company and brand as a whole. For them, Google is the cable company or what AT&T was twenty years ago, a company with whom you have to use, one that no matter how much they try and act as though their business exists for you, regardless of their actual sincerity in saying so, you can't fully believe given their power and leverage. For the savvy marketer, Google is the mafia don, giver of wealth but fickle, ruthless, and a relationship that requires constant feather gloves, living with constant anxiety, never sure when the next hit will be you.

My marketing life ended two years with little fanfare. One day my ads were running. The next they weren't. No emails, no warnings, and most challenging of all, no recourse - no chance to learn what I did wrong to educate others, no chance to correct, improve, appeal or atone. If only my story were unique. Instead it happens daily to countless marketers, many legitimate, many like me who get caught up in the machine learning, false positive inducing world of Google Quality Score and Ad Policy enforcement. Looking for some in the weed understanding of the daily challenge faced by the small to midsize marketer? Have a read of this WebMasterWorld thread on Adwords. Lucky for this individual, they received an email first.

Everyone has their two degrees of separation from someone who got Google-whacked. A successful search engine marketer (white hat) wrote the other day, "I know of a company...largest affiliate for <redacted> that had all their Google accounts closed b/c they kept relaunching campaigns under new domains after they got hit with low quality score." Now, that ban makes sense, at least as its described. The company tried to play the system and lost.

Quality is Job #1

Anytime I or any individual criticizes Google, it requires a delicate balance, because a single voice against an established system always struggles not to sound like whiny and scorned. When a system becomes ingrained and accepted, dissenting voices get marginalized and those with dissent often relegated to the same category as conspiracy theorists. So, let's focus not a problem but one of Google's wonderful inventions - Quality Score. Google has a history of systematizing and automating through technology business operations that most either didn't do routinely or did manually. Evaluating and ranking first landing pages, then the various components of the ecosystem around the landing page - keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and ad text - makes incredible sense and worked out to be one of those decisions that even if it was the most capitalistic of decisions, i.e. make more money, looks almost purely user focused, a decision that just happened to be one of their major inflection points (another being the decision earlier on to take CTR not just CPC into account when pricing ads).

Quality Score is truly great. No one that I know dislikes the concept of Quality Score, only its implementation. To quote another marketer, "How can you be for 100% sure if a site is in violation with the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines before you submit the site?" Put another way, "How can Adwords ban you for submitting sites that that seems to be in violation with the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines while there is not a tool where can check if an URL is ok to submit?"

The Google Answer (phrased in English rather than the non-transparent Googlish):

A) All the information you could ever want is available on our website. Never mind that each statement leads you to say, "Well what does that mean exactly." If you are a real company you wouldn't even have to ask these questions.B) We don't want you to know. We don't trust you. You will just game the system further. If you are a real company you wouldn't even have to ask these questions.C) We don't actually care about fairness and equality. We are a company of the intellectual elite and no matter how sincere we think we are being, our elitist attitude seeps into our work.

The Google Whack

This is the type of note you might receive if your site has been flagged by Google as one that has violated their terms. You may or MAY NOT have received a warning.

"Hello,

Your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple submissions of poor quality landing pages. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue, and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need more information about our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, please visit ...

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions, please visit ...

We appreciate your cooperation."

Note the language. "Our support team is unable to help you..." and most important of all, "We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the future." If you aren't incensed, outraged, and absolutely frightened, check your pulse. If you are a class action lawyer, get going. These are the makings of issues far larger than click fraud. This is people's livelihoods.

You have only one identity with Google. You could end up in a completely different line of work, go from the online equivalent of drug dealer to guidance counselor. But if you were banned once, you are still banned. People simply don't understand the magnitude of the issue. And in five years when the first suits start happening, it will be too late. Any meaningful change too little to make a difference with their coffers, like Microsoft's five years ago, too full to matter.

These bans are nothing short of identity fraud.

The Double Standard

Now, before you dismiss those for whom Google ended their marketing lives, thinking they just sit around and kvetch, either virtually on forums or on overly long blog posts, that they are just a noisy group of people who broke the rules and simply can't take their punishment, you need to know the hidden secrets to Google.

They don't understand the advertising world. They are a technology company whose engineers create rules (they won't use the word rules) for a ecosystem whose gradations mean almost nothing to them. The handful of engineers who do understand the internet advertising landscape, end up leaving because they see the gaping holes of opportunity that Google doesn't and won't grasp. Luckily for them, these holes represent companies that will be purchased for hundreds of millions of dollars, some by Google.

Google is a profit machine with a double standard. All advertisers are not treated equal. Quality Score is to many the Wizard of Oz, a mystical and almost mythical being that controls their lives, a faceless demi-god that if sacrifices were desired, sacrifices it would get. Quality Score is not a being. It is a knob. A lever that can be manually adjusted and is adjusted.

The double standard - Google controls the internet world but doesn't understand advertising. Google does not practice what they preach. They can't afford to.

Big Whale Hunting: What Google Doesn't Want You to Know

What do they call those who spend a lot money at a casino - whales. What do whales get - almost anything they want. Who does every casino want - a whale. Who is the real internet casino - Google. Who gets special treatment - whales.

Spend enough at Google and the rules for others don't apply.

Spend enough and the curtain gets removed from the Wizard of Oz. The dialog goes something like this, "You're site just got dinged by a new quality score release? Hold on. I will make sure to do an override so that you aren't automatically hit."

It can also go like this, "I just wanted to let you know that there will be a policy change coming up that will impact quality score. Here is what you need to do in order to comply."

We're not talking about non-savvy, big spenders who get a courtesy call. We are talking about some of the most savvy, big spenders whose businesses continually push the limits of what Google considers adding value. These are some of the necessary evil sites, ones that Google will probably copy / push out eventually but for now, they spend enough and aren't bad enough. These are companies that also break the rules, but who have been reinstated or saved before being completely blacklisted. And, perhaps most importantly of all, these aren't unique properties. These are businesses where a number of similar players exist, but if you aren't at a certain threshold or don't know the right person (which often go together), yours will be shut down while theirs will still run.

I don't blame Google for doing this. It's how any company would act to protect their revenue, public or private. They are after all a company, and no matter what the founders believe regarding the vision of the platform, the day to day business managers must cope with pushing growth and the people responsible for that growth. Some people might work for the joy of the product (and they make some great products), but more than a few work there to make money. And no one, not even Google, can make money - this much money - without people willing to take some risk and treat some clients better than others.

The Trusted Spender

The special treatment, documented in email exchanges and not some internet advertising lore, sounds more and more like an informal trusted spender program. If you are big enough, you get treated like a human by a human. That's all that everyone else really wants. And, while in theory it is not good that two people in like businesses receive different treatment based on their monetary value to the company, in practice it is understood and begrudgingly accepted. As practiced by Google, though, it amounts to segregation. Why should one get to do something the other can't? Quality Score in a casino is done the same way as Google - as a price deterrent. You can't play at certain tables unless you can spend a certain amount. Google's version of course works the reverse. It tries to discourage people by setting high minumums.

Google and Casino's both have their whales. The big difference today is that Google resembles the lawless Vegas from years past while Vegas casinos come off as the more democratic institution. Lucky for Google so few people really understand the implications of their injustice that those who do will continue to be lone whistle blowers of a frequency no one can hear.

Recently, I had the chance to moderate a panel discussing the virtual goods / virtual currency ecosystem. While, an ever increasing amount of funds entering this ecosystem, a large and multi-hundred million dollar annually portion, comes from users engaging in ads to earn points. In other words, incentivized marketing. If you have ever gone to a sporting event, you have had a first hand
experience with a long-standing offline version incentivized marketing. This is but one of many. The internet, though, has allowed
companies to use incentives in new way, one that no longer has a geographic
constraint.

The downside of using any incentive is of course that you don't
really know if the user has an interest in your good or service or
simply the incentive. I started thinking about the world of
incentivized marketing again not only because of the panel but due to personal experience with
fraud that occurred to an advertiser friend who tried the space for the first time. It was clear from this experience that the users didn't want his service, only the incentive. That's not always the case, but don't ask him to believe that.

I wouldn't call this an anniversary piece, but incentivized marketing is celebrating at least its 10th year online. This is what the landscape looks like today.

Loyalty ProgramsAlmost all of us
have joined a loyalty program at one time or another. Those in our
space are some of the biggest users and proponent of such programs -
just look at all the black American Express cards floating around
Affiliate Summit. Spend money, earn points, redeem for rewards. Pretty
simple formula. It has worked for card companies and large stores to
keep customers spending. Not surprising that someone figured out how to
do it online. The big difference is that spending is agnostic. Instead
of having to use a particular card or spend at a particular store, you
could spend anywhere that had an affiliate program. The online
versions, like ebates and mypoints, in essence split the commissions
they earned back with the consumers in the form of points. Earn enough
points and you get cash back. It's not all that different from Bing
shopping.

Promotional Offer / Reg Path While
a good model, loyalty themed incentivized sites struggle to get more
customers. Recognizing the power of incentives, a new breed of
companies pioneered their use in a different way. Instead of a loyalty
program, they went for a model more akin to the offline rebate system -
it was a model of breakage. It was get this by doing this, but not
everyone who starts the process will complete it successfully. Calling
the online version the breakage model, while true, doesn't sound quite
as favorable. These
offers all start with an offer for the user to receive something,
generally with the well known "Free*" tag line. And, for years they
ruled the roost on run of network buying and the incentive space,
creating multiple $100mm+ yearly revenue companies. Beginning with the
media rebound in 2005/2006, it became a tougher landscape, and while
still going strong for a select few, the overall size of the
promotional incentivized landscape is a fraction of what it once was.
That doesn't mean the incentivized landscape is smaller, but the Free
Mac product method has seen its peak.

The skinny: Moderate to lower quality. High volume potential. Moderate fraud as a percentage of total. Rating: Market Under-perform.

Get Paid to Try (GPT)When
a veteran of the space calls the Get Paid to Try or GPT's as they are
known amongst those working the daily incentivized grind, a cancer, you
get a clear sense of how this person feels about the model. At one
level, GPT's seem quite similar to the loyalty iteration as users
receive a cash incentive for participating in offers. The biggest
difference it seems is a subtle but important one. They tend to have a
lower barrier to entry both from a business perspective and a user one.
From a user end, the person has to do less to receive money. From a
business end, they have a much less robust selection of offers - few to
no name-brand merchants and a heavy emphasis on the value of making
money from using the service, instead of the value of a relationship
with the site. The combination is a model where you can literally buy a
script for a few hundred bucks and open up your own GPT business. Often
sold as part of a work-from-home lifestyle business, those starting it
have less interest in policing quality or an awareness of quality. They
become easy targets for those looking to perpetrate fraud and earn
money by completing offers without any interest in the service itself.
As one other said, we stopped working with these sites and didn't miss
a beat. Not all are bad, but so many are that they've definitely hurt
the overall perception.

The skinny: Low to no quality. Moderate to high volume potential. High fraud. Rating: Sell.

Micro-payments / Virtual CurrencyActive users of Facebook will know these
businesses well, not so much from who they are but what they do.
Players of the 50mm active user strong and growing Farmville can tell
you about the distinction between Farmville Coins and Farmville Cash.
The former you earn while engaging with the site. The latter you get
only by making the site money. And, users can make the site money in
one of two ways, through actual payments via Paypay, credit card, and
mobile phone or by participating on an offer. These offers are
integrated into the user experience, and the process of tracking offer
completion and awarding points are handled by a new breed of incentive
firms, the managed offer platforms, which includes the subjects of a
previous set of articles looking at the space - OfferPal, SuperRewards,
Gambit, and DoubleDing to name a few. In some ways they create
mini-loyalty programs as they enable users to earn points towards a
social game being played. They differ slightly as the points are
desired at a specific time, i.e., people convert on them when they want
something from the site as opposed to they want something and want to
earn points with a specific program.

What the promotional space
has dropped in market share, the managed offer platforms have picked up
and then some. The companies in this space include your typical
self-funded opportunistic firms but also some high powered companies
with serious investor backing. Separating themselves further from their
high volume predecessor, users here have their identity tied to usage.
Whereas in the GPT or Promotional iterations a user can relatively
easily go through giving false information or with false intentions,
users of social games on their social networking site can't mascaraed
as someone else, not without losing the benefits of the social
landscape which often attracted them in the first place. The identity
feature doesn't ensure perfect quality, unfortunately, but it tends to
limit the damage. Instead of them saying to an advertiser I never
signed up for this, they might just say, I'm not interested and/or
cancel a trial quickly.

The skinny: Moderate to A- quality for the right advertiser. High volume potential. Low fraud. Rating: Recommend.

Macro-payments / Alternative PaymentsThose
willing to date themselves (age wise not in an ego sense), will admit
to remembering Ken Chan's YourFreeDVD's ruling the display landscape.
True to its name, YourFreeDVD's, or as some jokingly called it
YourFeeDVD's, offered users a straight forward proposition. Complete an
offer and get a DVD of your choice. It was arguably the first of the
Promotional Offers, certainly the first to hit such scale. For better
and worse, though, the straight forward model evolved into more of
today's registration path and requiring users to complete more than one
offer ton increase breakage. These acts weren't done out of malice but
to compete with other headwinds - the decreasing novelty of DVDs
(lowering their perceived value), increased media costs, and the need
to pay more per email submit to compete against newer entrants offering
promotions of perceived higher value - such as gift cards and
electronics, the stuff that created the promotional legends. At its
core, though, the YFDirect model was the predecessor of today's
macro-payment / alternative payment format. It offered users interested
in a good or service a chance to get it through an alternate means (as
opposed to the promotions business that was historically defined by its
obfuscation of what users have to do)

In a strange, full-circle
manner, alternative payments are back and thriving. They are lead by a
new breed of companies - Trial Pay being the most notable - who have
put a slight twist to the original model. Instead of starting with a
promotion or product that users can receive through alternative means,
they sit in the background of the existing shopping experience and help
to capture users that might end up abandoning the process. Let's say
you want to download a popular software title, not necessarily knowing
the price. When you find out about the annual fee, say $29.99, you
start to balk. That's where Trial Pay comes in. They work with the
software titles to allow them to offers users a non-cash (not directly
cash option), such as by signing-up for a credit card. It's almost like
a modern day barter system - trading one customer for another - but
executed in a scale not available offline. Trial Pay in particular has
leveraged their alternate payment platform to help more traditional
merchants increase the average order size of their carts. They can
reward users with movie tickets as an example by hitting certain
thresholds.